Fig. 1. Still from Lexicon Valley. I am a new listener of Lexicon Valley Podcast, and I ran across an episode with a subject that seemed very interesting and answered a question I hadn’t previously thought to ask. Why do languages have gender, and more importantly, why doesn’t the English language have that? Having an advantage of being bilingual in Spanish, I was instantly struck with this question and realized it had never occurred to me that English doesn’t follow the same pattern of adding gender to nouns. First, Some Rules: Lexicon Valley Podcast’s host, John McWhorter, tackles this question expertly. In some languages, gender is divided between masculine and feminine, and some gender rules in some languages makes sense. McWhorter continues and states that the gendered feminine and mascul...